


The Edge of Green

by intaglionyx



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: F/F, Magic Meta, Mentor/Protégé, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intaglionyx/pseuds/intaglionyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>She has not lost control; the green is not Mist, to take her mind and set her feral with strength and fear in equal measure.  These are simply desires of hers, raised from dormancy, dragged past self-set limits broken by the green as the green is wont to do.</em>
</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Fran teaches Penelo some rudimentary green magick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Edge of Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stealth_Noodle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/gifts).



> Written for the prompt:
> 
> "Fran/Penelo. In canon they struck me as being subtly set up in a mentoring relationship like the one between Balthier and Vaan, and I'd love to see that dynamic explored, either during canon or after it. Send them on a piratical adventure, have one teach the other something, send them out for a wild night on the town, or do whatever strikes your fancy! If you don't want to ship them, I'd be happy with a platonic relationship, too--I'd just really like to see them interacting."

They swap weapons for a day, so that she holds the dancer’s long daggers while Penelo tests the string of Fran’s surprisingly heavy bow. It is, Fran realizes, an uneven exchange. Though she is not used to the reduced weight and reach of a dagger as compared to one of the greater blades, her own reach and speed offer some compensation. Penelo, she quickly realizes, is simply unsuited to a bow. The hume, even more so than many of her species, is too accustomed to constant movement, too impatient for a skill that draws so heavily on its practitioners’ stillness and care. She is a dancer, and Fran feels some momentary guilt over not having anticipated the problem. 

After some consideration, she suggests a change in the terms of their initial exchange, both eschewing weapons entirely so that Fran can teach Penelo in a school unfamiliar to her. Fran has seen her practice magicks both black and white, and she thinks the younger mage could benefit from schooling in the green, a color of magic that is, to her knowledge, exclusive to her own kind. 

“All magic inflicts change in some way, altering for good or for ill, from within or without.” She stands behind Penelo, palms not quite cupping the hume’s elbows, claws just barely touching her skin. In a lesson to another viera, her hands would be held almost flush with the backs of her students’, but the difference in height is what it is. “Whether one sets loose a blast of Fire or a casting of Poisona, both inflict change. Damage is the reverse of healing, but the comparison is not so easily made between the white or black and the green. The green has no opposite. Or, more accurately, it is its own opposite.” 

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Penelo says, and there is no strain in her voice, no tension at the feel of another standing almost flush behind her, where she cannot see. In many ways, she reminds Fran of her brethren. Like their knight companion, she seems more in tune with the needs of her group than with her own wants, more willing to submit herself to another’s needs as well as another’s instruction — and that thought nearly takes her mind somewhere it likely should not be allowed to go. 

Fran speaks, hearing the hume’s steady heartbeat. “The black chars and cuts and wounds, while the white heals, and the white can only restore, never push the body of a hume or a moogle beyond its natural peak. The green, however, does exactly that. Consider Bubble, a spell that pushes a target’s endurance to exactly twice its natural limits — it pushes a person beyond their natural peak, beyond even the apex of a person’s potential development. Consider Protect or Shellga, spells that function like palings stretched around a person’s form. And there is Leap, which increases a person’s speed of movement without the drawbacks of a spell like Haste. The green removes limits, or alters them, making a person more than they would be with said limits still intact.”

She instructs Penelo on how to shed such limits, first from herself and then from Fran. She teaches her Leap; by then, her palms do cup the dancer’s elbows, claw-like nails slowly grazing up and down the backs of her forearms, and she can feel Penelo’s muscles tense for a moment, feel her heart set to beating at a rapid pace as the change wracks her body. Fran can smell Penelo beginning to sweat in spite of the breeze that sifts through the leaves and branches around them. “It is natural for the body to struggle to adapt,” she says in a low voice, as the trembling begins to subside. She traces interlinked circles against the insides of Penelo’s arms, against skin that she knows is just slightly paler than on the other side. Penelo’s breathing steadies, but not quite to what it was before, and even as Fran resumes the lesson, her fingers still move and she still stands behind Penelo with a space thinner than a thumb separating them. 

Later, after testing her limbs and her heart with rapid, almost blurring bursts of movement, Penelo turns to set the spell on her, setting off a wave of trembling and tension that sets her body to aching for as long as it takes to compensate for the changes wrought in it. Fran breathes, filling her quaking lungs with the scent of forest and hume and viera. As the scents of their respective sweat commingle in each breath, Fran indulges in her imagination, thinks of bearing the dancer down, of driving a thigh betwixt hers, of claiming her mouth. She has not lost control; the green is not Mist, to take her mind and set her feral with strength and fear in equal measure. These are simply desires of hers, raised from dormancy, dragged past self-set limits broken by the green as the green is wont to do. 

She does not. For all that her willingness to follow her desires above all else is what set her out of her Wood at the first, she prefers to wait, to see if this impulse grows into something greater or blows away with the wind that still sifts through the leaves and branches shielding them from the sun. Penelo looks up at her, face still cast in shadow, and her smile and her eyes hold something they did not before this lesson started.

As they make their way back to the crystal that will return them to Penelo’s sand-rimmed city, the two casts of Leap still holding strong, Fran thinks of the mystery Penelo’s expression held in the forest and wonders, even as that quashed impulse swells into something more.


End file.
